Friday, November 02, 2007

Bad Luck Canucks

Cheering for the Vancouver Canucks is one, big, long exercise in pain.

It's not bad enough that the team keeps losing games, or that we're subjected to the public displays of in-fighting.

Now, the Canucks have seriously caught the injury jinx, and it ain't pretty.

Both Kevin Bieksa and Sami Salo were taken to hospital with injuries. Bieksa suffered a lacerated right calf when he was cut by the skate of Predator Vernon Fiddler during the second period.

''There's a pretty deep cut there, with the (calf) muscle,'' coach Alain Vigneault said after the game.

Salo, who was playing only his fourth game after returning to the lineup after a wrist injury, was hit in the face by puck shot by teammate Alex Edler. Salo went down and bled profusely before being helped off the ice.

Vigneault said Salo, who missed nine games after being injured in an intra-squad game, was hit in the orbital bone around the eye and his nose.

Holy crap, dude! These aren't minor little nicks and scratches, and will certainly linger for a long time.

Canucks are now 1-6 at home ... WTF??

Anyway, Mitchell is playing with a very sore ankle, Krajicek is out after slipping and falling on a banana peel that Alex Ovechkin threw onto a DC sidewalk, and now this?

Yikes. So, the Canucks D is consisting of a suddenly-looking-old Mattias Ohlund, Mike "Vanilla" Weaver, Aaron "Slow as molasses" Miller, an Injured Willie Mitchell, and then some call ups.

Fun fact: there's no such thing as an "orbital bone." The orbit is made up of parts of seven different bones; the most commonly broken area is the inferior aspect, which consists of parts of the maxilla (upper jaw), zygomatic (cheek), and palatine (hard palate) bones.